Friday, May 22, 2009

Good news: Using GSS data, I looked at the number of children for white women ages 40-49 averaged over the nineties, and then in this decade:

IQ Group/Mean kids this decade/Change over the past decadeHigh IQ--(1.82) up .23Medium IQ--(2.07) up .08Low IQ--(2.00) down .17

The high-IQ group (those scoring 8, 9, or 10 out of ten on a vocabulary test) averaged 1.82 kids this decade which is up .23 over the 1990s. The medium-IQ group (5 through 7 on the test) have had 2.07 kids, .08 higher than last decade. The low-IQ group (0 through 4 on the test) came down from 2.17 in the 1990s to 2.00 in this decade.

In other words, things have improved a lot in only 10 years. I know, I know that mean white IQ is not going up as a result, but I still like it.

3 comments:

This does not make much sense. And it to me suggests there are problems in the GSS data.

I don't see evidence to suggest an increase in the High IQ kids, even a bit. Instead we see more and more "coaching schools" for SATs and ACTs, etc.

There can't be that many Asian kids providing competition outside California and a few other coastal states (i.e. Texas, Ohio, and other states with low Asian populations would seem to be a drag on the idea that coaching up kids for the SAT is required to keep up with Asian kids coaching.)

If White kids are getting smarter at the top end, why are we not seeing top-end, high IQ, mostly/all White schools posting increased test scores?

Wouldn't that be a "reality check" on the numbers. Sorry to be skeptical. But here in Orange County California the Irvine, San Juan Capistrano, San Clemente, and Huntington School districts have not posted test score increases, just the opposite (and they remain mostly White, White/Asian in the case of Irvine).

Whiskey: It sounds like I wasn't clear. The data indicate that smart white women who have completed their fertility in this decade had more children than smart white women last decade. But a small improvement like that should not change the average IQ of children.

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be." ~ Lord Kelvin